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A Letter to Congressional Republicans

Submitted by Noah Brand on Wed, 2017-07-26 11:51

Dear Congressional Republicans,

Right now, y'all are way the hell up Shit Creek. You're incapable of passing any legislation, even when you violate the rules of how legislation is written and passed. Your popularity is plummeting, partly because you keep trying and failing to pass a healthcare bill that literally nobody wants, and that none of your mouthpieces can even make a positive case for. Your party is irrevocably associated with a dangerously incompetent president who has a lower approval rating than syphilis, and who's making your jobs harder every day he wakes up. Worst of all, it's beginning to look like, for the first time in most of your lives, there may be negative consequences for your actions. That's got to be terrifying. You've been gutless, amoral lapdogs for plutocracy for a long time, but now people seem upset by that fact. You're in danger of losing your cushy jobs, which is something you understand. The rest of us are in danger of losing much more important things, but you've never cared about that before, and I don't imagine you're about to start, so let's get back to you: you're screwed.

There is a solution, though. One simple thing you can do that does not require you to give up a single thing you care about, and that will allow you to burnish your image, look like principled statesmen instead of cowardly incompetents, and most of all, avoid any electoral or personal consequences for your incompetence and cowardice.

Declare Donald Trump mentally incompetent due to dementia, and invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

This would literally solve all your problems. Not anyone else's problems, but again, we know those aren't something you worry about. Impeachment is a long and complicated process, by design, whereas invoking the 25th involves a lot less paperwork. Most importantly, impeachment would involve you having to admit you were wrong, that the man you've been unwilling to say a single word against is, in fact, a criminal, and you supported him anyway. The 25th absolves you of that; you can say that the terrible tragedy of his illness means he must go for the good of the nation, and you won't have to answer a single question about policy.

That tragedy card is going to be really valuable for you. Any criticism of your actions can be shouted down with lots of weeping about people being insensitive at such a painful time. It'll be a perfect excuse to kill the Russia investigation, since it would be cruel to keep bringing up criminal collusion and money-laundering during a tragic medical decision. Let's face it, if Mueller keeps pulling on that thread, there are a lot of you who stand to be implicated, so you'll sleep better if it just goes away. There won't be any airtime for anyone to talk about you killing the investigation, because you'll do it quietly during the period when Trump is screaming loudly about how he's perfectly sane and you're all traitorous reptilians trying to steal his precious thoughts through his penis, and we both know which of those makes better TV.

Obviously, Trump's family will be key to this plan. You'll need a couple of them on the usual shows being loudly sad about this terrible tragedy and how it would be super insensitive to criticize or investigate any of them, or really anyone at all, when they're dealing with such a deeply personal issue. It'll also look better if the "initial reports" of him having several screws loose come from a family member. A lot of people have had to actually deal with senile parents in real life, and that will make them empathize with the Trump brats, which would otherwise be literally impossible. Fortunately, it shouldn't be hard to get his family on board with this plan. Jared and Ivanka will leap at the chance to enhance their own brand by throwing the ol' Creamsicle Caligula under the bus, and the others can either be bought with cash or distracted with shiny objects, whichever's easiest.

You don't need to worry about opposition. House and Senate Democrats will cheerfully vote to get rid of that asshole on any pretext. The media will adore this move; it'll let them pontificate solemnly about the Constitution, editorialize sincerely about the tragedy of dementia, and best of all, spend a lot more time putting Donald Trump on TV screens, which they cannot resist even when they ought to. As to the American people, I give you my personal guarantee that the lefties in this country will spend half our time making hilarious memes about Trump's mental incompetence, and the other half arguing about whether those memes constitute ableist hate speech, so we'll be happy.

There will be a big, beautiful media narrative that will play out, and we'll all play our roles properly. While we're doing that, you and President Pence can quietly pass that bill making it legal to hunt poor people for sport, which I know you've been wanting to. And for the next twenty years, whenever someone accuses you of putting party before country, you can look deeply wounded and say "Sir, I voted to remove a Republican president from office for the good of this great nation." Which means you can keep putting party before country with no consequences.

Essentially, this plan gives you an all-purpose reset button. All your incompetence, venality, and corruption can be blamed on poor, senile, crazy ol' Trump. Even the stuff that predates him; nobody fact-checks timelines any more. You can do a whole storyline about how the Republicans are emerging from the cloud of Trump (which wasn't actually anyone's fault but was a terrible tragedy that no one's allowed to ask questions about) and coming into their own, crafting a bold new future for America that coincidentally looks a lot like 1891. I mean, that'll really only buy you about 6-12 months before someone notices that you still can't do your jobs on even a basic level, but hey, you can hurt a lot of people in that time, and I know that's the only way you can still feel anything.

I have some reservations about presenting you with this simple and effective plan, but I realize that there's no realistic chance of it being implemented. You callow, inept dickwits have more than demonstrated that you couldn't organize a handjob in a whorehouse with a fistful of fifties, so I'm not worried about your pulling off anything resembling an actual plan.

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